Revealed: Facebook's music plans involve Spotify, others — For the past few months, I have been hearing about Facebook and Spotify getting a lot closer as companies, with a much tighter integration between the two services. However, Facebook's musical ambitions go beyond Spotify and include other music services and applications.

New Startup! — Entrepreneurs gonna entrepreneur. I have a new startup! We are building something consumer-facing, something social — all the things I love best — for optimal founder-market fit!. It's crazy times in the Valley and while I prefer doing startups when the going's tough …

Caterina Fake Raising $2M for New Social Start-Up — Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch and an investor in companies like Etsy, has a new start-up that she says will be consumer-facing and social. — She's raising what looks like a $2 million round, according to an SEC filing …

New Top-Level Domains Approved by ICANN — The Board of ICANN today gave final approval to the most dramatic change to the Internet in four decades — allowing the expansion of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). This monumental decision will allow companies and organizations to turn their own brands …

Consumers Don't Want Tablets, They Want iPads — A theory: Though consumers desire the iPad for the functions it performs, they want it more for what it is. Just as many preferred the iPod to the generic MP3 player, so too do they prefer the iPad to the generic “tablet.”

RIM is black-burying carriers with half-baked BlackBerrys — Launching new products is always difficult. Launching new products with hundreds of different carriers is exponentially more difficult. Apparently there is an easy way and a hard way to do things, however, and RIM has been making carriers offers they can't refuse.

Hulu Plays Along With Apple's New Rules. Who's Next? — Apple's new subscription rules could have posed a problem for services like Hulu. But when Steve Jobs changed his mind earlier this month, life got a lot easier. — Here's the old version of the Hulu Plus subscription app for the iPad:

Skype Gets More Social with Deeper Facebook Integration — We are excited to announce the new Skype 5.5 Beta version for Windows, which enhances the user experience and features new updates to Skype based on user feedback. Skype is also continuing to bring people together whenever …

Skype Fires Executives, Avoiding Payouts — Skype Technologies SA, the Internet- calling service being bought by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), is firing senior executives before the deal closes, a move that reduces the value of their payout, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Mobile Apps Put the Web in Their Rear-view Mirror — Although the Internet entered the mainstream a mere 15 years ago, life without it today is nearly incomprehensible. And our use of the web has rapidly changed as well. In simple terms, it has evolved from online directories (Yahoo!) …

Investors Provide Millions to Risky Start-Ups — PALO ALTO, Calif. — What if you threw a $41 million party and nobody came? A start-up company called Color knows how that feels. — In March, Color unveiled its photo-sharing cellphone application — and revealed that it had raised $41 million …

New security issue at Dropbox — I don't have much more in the way of useful details (e.g. screen video showing it in action), though I do have one other guy who performed the same tests b/c I wanted to rule out that my local-to-my-machine dropbox software was doing it somehow or that I was nuts.

Best Buy Battles Over Use of ‘Geek’ — Retailer Fights to Protect Squad's Trademark; Putting Rivals—and a Priest—on Notice — Just a few decades ago, a geek was a carnival freak who bit the heads off of chickens and rats. — Then geek became a catchall word for socially maladjusted individuals …

Meet The First Indie Publisher To Sell A Million Kindle Books — Amazon is touting its self-publishing platform today with the announcement that John Locke has become the first independently published author to become a member of the “Kindle Million club,” selling over 1 million Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing.

The Android Market: 'It's a loud, obnoxious baby' — Having ported a hit game from iOS, one developer reveals the good, the bad and the ugly — Battleheart character. Source: Mika Mobile — “With Battleheart having been on sale for a few weeks, I feel I'm equipped to offer …

Microsoft is porting Zune HD apps to Windows Phone — Microsoft revealed recently that it will be porting at least some of its Zune HD apps to Windows Phone. I say “recently,” but the revelation actually occurred 10 days ago on a two-episode-old episode of the Zune Insider podcast.

2018 Top 100 Global Tech Leaders — 21st century technology-sector leadership requires more than financial success. It also requires a commitment to compliance, innovation, and much more. Who are today's leaders?